1035 to 1037 upgrade observations

[tbrown25]

I updated my system from 1035 to 1037 some time back. The upgrade went relatively smooth. However, several movies and a few tvshows disappeared. After a bit, I realized the missing movies were all on an external USB drive. I found that after the upgrade, the USB drive designation had changed from SDA1 to SDB1, thus was no longer being scanned as I did not have that drive path set up. A couple of reboots got it back designated SDA1 and the missing movies re-appeared.

GOOD STUFF

This version seems to have fixed the problem where files containing DTS-HD audio did not play the audio unless the track was re-selected after starting playback.Glad to see that fixed.

The MOVIE ALL screen now sorts correctly. Before, movies that had been manually corrected appeared first, followed by those that scraped correctly. Now they are all sorted alphabetically. (This may have been fixed in 1036, but that version had so many other problems I had to revert to 1035)

Have not seen HD playback stutter and fall back to the menu like it did under 1036. (though I think someone did report that problem in another post)

NOT SO GOOD STUFF

When selecting a tv show and displaying the season list, the movie main poster no longer displays on that screen.

In the TVSHOW ALL screen, the tvshows are not sorted alphabetically. Appears to be in a "recently added" order.

Perhaps this is my imagination, but DVD playback does not seem to upscale as well as it used to. The video appears a bit grainy and dull .


Overall, 1037 is a bit of a disappointment. I had been told this release would address the tv show section problems, Doesn't seem to have fixed any of that.and now with the main poster missing, is a bit worse. I do not see any speed improvement in scraping. But it doesn't seem worse either.

I'll stay with 1037 a bit longer and see what else I find..

[SaturnV]

I also made the upgrade from 1035 to 1037

GOOD STUFF

DVD ISO file playback appears to be less jerky than on previous release - which is good news and was for me major problem (playback not being as good as the original DVD negates the whole purpose of the DMS for me). So far I have had very few dropped frames with 1037 - which I am cautiously optimistic about.

NOT SO GOOD STUFF
After upgrading to 1037 I was expecting the scraping to be much improved and hopefully find some of the TV shows and movies that 1035 never displayed (even when added manually). There were no obvious changes after updating the database, so I followed the advice in the release notice and rebuilt the database. After a fair amount of time and a lot of obvious disc activity, guess how many movies and TV shows the DMS found on an 8TB hard disk full of DVD ISO files? Answer - NONE AT ALL, NOT ONE MOVIE OR TV SHOW!!! I've wiped my movie database on the promise of improvements, only to find seems to now be totally broken. I tried rebooting and rebuilding the database again - only to get the same result "Your database is empty". Not impressed. I shall try again this evening, but in the meantime I advise caution with doing a database rebuild, you may lose the lot like me.

- DVD ISO playback stills defaults to display subtitles (even when you know the DVD has been authored to not show them by default).
- Still no way to select different DVD angles - big problem for me, I have numerous multi-angle DVDs (Spacecraft Films DVDs of the Apollo Space programme make extensive use of angles). By the way, every physical DVD and Blu-Ray player has to support multi-angle, so this is not some obscure feature.
- DVD fast-forward and, in particular, rewind don't work very well. Rewind is so bad it is almost useless (press rewind, display doesn't update and rewind speed seems to increase exponentially and within seconds you're at the start of the title).

[Rider]

- DVD ISO playback stills defaults to display subtitles (even when you know the DVD has been authored to not show them by default).

- DVD fast-forward and, in particular, rewind don't work very well. Rewind is so bad it is almost useless (press rewind, display doesn't update and rewind speed seems to increase exponentially and within seconds you're at the start of the title).

Funny thing..... these two "features" are present in v1.0.1.0 and work just as you described, except fast forward works the way it should. The subtitles are displayed even if you explicitly turn them off before hitting Play.

I've learned to live with these quirks in v1.0.1.0 as the alternative is a version that really doesn't work well.

[SaturnV]

Update.

After updating from 1.0.3.5 to 1.0.3.7, I followed the recommendation to rebuild the media library, which found NONE of the hundreds of DVD ISO files of movies and TV shows that I have on an 8TB disk inside the DMS. The movie server searches through the disk and actually displays the files it searches through (ie it is reading the disk), but find NOTHING to add to the Library, returning the message "You media Library is empty".

Previously 1.0.3.5 would automatically find approximately 60% of my ISO files (not all correctly, but it did find them).

After several attempts, I downgraded 1.0.3.5, but now this version also finds nothing when you rebuild or update the media library..

I then loaded 1.0.1.0, did a factory reset, re-registered the DMS. Rebuilding or updating the library still doesn't find anything at all. All of my DVD ISO files follow your recommended naming convention.

I have also checked that the DMS is connected to the internet and was able to use the Google App from the DMS to prove it had internet access.

I've run out of ideas. Any suggestions (other than use the DMS as a paperweight)..

[Hunter1955]

SaturnV, I had the same problem. here is how I resolved it

Go to Settings/advance settings/apps/Tab over to all, select DVDFAB movie server then clear data. It went great.

It went so well that movies it had not found before it was finding now. I'm at 1.0.1.0

[SaturnV]

Hunter1955 thanks for the advice, but sadly in my case this did not fix the issue. I still have an empty media library after clearing the data. I must admit though, this is a well-hidden setting screen that I had never found before!

*** Message to DVDFab *** - There appears to something wrong with the 1.0.3.7 release that makes permanent changes to the DMS software that are not undone by re-loading 1.0.1.0 or 1.0.3.5 or doing a factory reset. Since installing 1.0.3.7 and rebuilding the media library (as you suggest in the release notes), my media library is empty and nothing I do fixes this. My DVD Fab Movie Server is now broken.

I have tried:
Rebooting
Rebuilding the library
Updating the library
Re-loading 1.0.3.5
Re-loading 1.0.1.0
Re-loading 1.0.3.7 again
Replacing the hard disk for another which has a different set of ISO files
Clearing the data and cache (as described above)
Free up disk space on the hard drive
Restore to factory settings and re-validate my DVDFab login
Checked my Internet connection
Adding paths to the library


My disks have many hundreds of DVD and Blu-Ray ISO files (possibly thousands), all with filenames according to your recommended naming convention. Rebuilding or updating searches through all of the ISO files (and displays the filenames as it does), but none of them are ever added to the media library. Also, nothing gets added to the DMS list, so I can't even manually configure ISO files to add them to the Movies or TV Show lists.

I await suggestions on how to repair this..

[ting]

Hunter1955 thanks for the advice, but sadly in my case this did not fix the issue. I still have an empty media library after clearing the data. I must admit though, this is a well-hidden setting screen that I had never found before!

*** Message to DVDFab *** - There appears to something wrong with the 1.0.3.7 release that makes permanent changes to the DMS software that are not undone by re-loading 1.0.1.0 or 1.0.3.5 or doing a factory reset. Since installing 1.0.3.7 and rebuilding the media library (as you suggest in the release notes), my media library is empty and nothing I do fixes this. My DVD Fab Movie Server is now broken.

I have tried:
Rebooting
Rebuilding the library
Updating the library
Re-loading 1.0.3.5
Re-loading 1.0.1.0
Re-loading 1.0.3.7 again
Replacing the hard disk for another which has a different set of ISO files
Clearing the data and cache (as described above)
Free up disk space on the hard drive
Restore to factory settings and re-validate my DVDFab login
Checked my Internet connection
Adding paths to the library


My disks have many hundreds of DVD and Blu-Ray ISO files (possibly thousands), all with filenames according to your recommended naming convention. Rebuilding or updating searches through all of the ISO files (and displays the filenames as it does), but none of them are ever added to the media library. Also, nothing gets added to the DMS list, so I can't even manually configure ISO files to add them to the Movies or TV Show lists.

I await suggestions on how to repair this..

Please don't try it again, we are working to fix this problem, after finished it, I will info you.

Thanks.

[SaturnV]

In addition to the above problems (which are still broken), I have the following bugs:

- Unable to access the Google Play Store. I have tried the instructions given elsewhere in this forum to find the Play Store App in Settings and to de-install updates. This reverted the app to the factory version 7, which does nothing when you try to launch it. After a reboot it auto-updates back to version 12 even after unchecking "auto update" Version 12 also does not work.

- Audio - If I set to SPDIF and audio Pass Through, DTS HD works to my receiver over an fibre-optic link, but then normal Dolby or PCM sound does not play back (you get horrible digital noise), so you have to reset the audio settings to default and then it works. This is ridiculous - having to change the audio settings every time I switch from say a Blu-Ray with DTS HD audio to a DVD with Dolby 5.1. The explanation from DVDFab is that you can't use DTS HD over SPDIF because it has insufficient bandwidth is not correct. The Wiki page referenced quotes UNCOMPRESSED DTS audio - which never happens. Blu-Rays always use audio compression - and besides my normal blu-ray player will happily play whatever Blu-Ray or DVD audio you throw at it, all over SPDIF, so the 'it can't be done' DVDFab response is wrong.

- Still getting jerky DVD playback on 1.0.3.7, although not as bad as 1.0.3.5. Blu-Ray HD ISO playback is perfectly smooth, with no dropped frames at all.

- DVD multi-angle playback is not supported. This is mandatory in the blue-book standard for all DVD and Blu-Ray players (Cyberlink PowerDVD plays multi-angle DVDs perfectly on PC)

- DVD and Blu-Ray playback rewind is unusable because the screen picture does not update and just the shortest rewind skips the video back a very long way (or to the beginning). Fast forward is a little better, but does not stay at the same fast forward speed, which increases exponentially.

- Subtitles played by default, even when the DVD has been authored to not display subtitles by default

- Apparently no way to totally rebuild the media library. It does not delete what was previously there first, so if there is a corruption, you're stuck with it. Even a Factory Reset does not resolve this.

- Another bug I discovered this weekend - a directory of several .JPG images - select and click on any JPEG and it always plays the first. Only seems to occur when there are 100+ images in the directory.

- No way to specify that your "TV Shows" folder only contains TV Shows and your "Movies" folder only contains Movies because you cannot remove the setting for the root of your internal hard drive and this has to be set to one of - "TV Shows", "Movies" or "Mix". If you add the path to the "TV Shows" and "Movies" folders to the media sources and set them to Movies or TV Shows, they will be ignored because the root has to be set to "Mix".

- After booting the media server it always says it's found an unrecognised hard disk and do I want to format it. The default button is to format. Are you serious???? Every time I start my Movie Server I risk deleting 8TB of data!!


Please forget about new fancy features and updates for UHD until you first get the basics working correctly!!!!!

[tbrown25]

Well, got a major surprise today. When turning on my media player, I found several TV shows that had previously scraped perfectly fine now pointed to incorrect posters. These shows had been correct for at least 6 months (when they were first added to the system). Just turned on the medial player and now they are wrong. So, instead of watching a movie/episode, I wound up spending my time correcting these files.
This doesn't work for me. Reverting back to 1035 to see if that helps.

[SaturnV]

When I got these problems after loading 1.0.3.7, the DVDFab team advised me "Please don't try it again, we are working to fix this problem, after finished it, I will info you.". After not hearing a thing for two months, I decided I had nothing to loose and tried it again...

Firstly, a Factory Reset on version 1.0.3.7 did not fix the problems of not being able to add anything to the media library. I then reloaded version 1.0.3.1, which as before, didn't fix the issue. However, I then did something I hadn't previously tried; I did a Factory Reset whilst on 1.0.3.1 then loaded version 1.0.3.5 and rebuilt the Media library. Finally I have success - my media library has now rebuilt to a condition better than I have ever managed it get it. Loads of TV programmes which refused to be added are now present in the library. This also fixed another serious problem I had where nothing I did would allow me to launch the Google Play Store. Yes I had followed all the recommendations in this forum and none of them fixed it, but following this procedure did fix it.